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Live and Let Die

Posted by editor on July 4, 2007 at 9:08 AM EDT

Scratch JSR-313... EE 6 lives on as JSR-316

So it was a little weird in April when JSR-313, the JSR for Java EE 6, was withdrawn, with the comments on the review ballot indicating concerns over the licensing model. Many of us expected this would be resolved in time for JavaOne, but the conference came and went without a new formal JSR for EE 6. Instead, a few months later, JSR-316 has just been submitted to the JCP for approval.

But enough politics and legalese... you're probably wondering what's in it? According to the proposal, the top goals for JSR-316 are extensibility, a concept of "profiles" to deliver targeted subsets of EE 6, and a process for pruning obsolete API's from EE. The JSR also anticipates folding in JSR's 196, 236, 237, 299, and 311, as well as making updates to EJB, JPA, Servlets, JSF, JAX-WS, and the Java EE Connector API.

InfoQ has a roundup of the JSR, including extensive feedback quoted from a blog by Interface 21's Rod Johnson, who praises the customizability concepts in EE 6, which will allow vendors to focus their development and testing on only those parts of EE that make sense for them and their customers. "I believe that the enterprise Java community should welcome Java EE 6, and should welcome Sun's willingness to move with the times and take the choices that will strengthen the enterprise Java platform as a whole. There's a lot of good in J2EE/Java EE, but some of the problems have obscured it. Java EE 6 should change that!"

But what do you think? Do you need EE 6, or some particular subset of it? Are you ready to see obsolete API's like EJB CMP and JAX-RPC go away? Take a look at the JSR and let us know what you think.

Also in Java Today, the incubated Java Desktop Community project Swing Explorer offers "visual exploring of Swing-based application internals. It finds all windows in explored Swing application and displays their component hierarchies as a tree. Each component in the tree can be displayed in the Swing Explorer's work area and visually inspected. Swing Explorer helps to determine sub-components when user moves mouse over them and provides additional information about currently selected component (layout, size, coordinates, border and other things)."

Although the contents of Java SE 7 are still in flux, early candidates of concurrency features for inclusion are are already taking shape: a fork/join framework and a transfer queue. In New Concurrency Features for Java SE 7, InfoQ's Geoffrey Wiseman details a discussion with Doug Lea about these features and concurrency in Java SE 7.

Our latest JavaOne Community Corner Podcast is j1-2k7-mtH02: Interview with Brian Behlendorf. In an interview from the JavaOne 2007 java.net Community Corner, java.net editor Chris Adamson interviews Brian Behlendorf about his early involvement with the Apache project, the creation and development of the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, his perspectives on the open-source community, and what his next big project could be.

Cay Horstmann discusses JSF Support in Eclipse Europa and NetBeans 6.0m10 in today's Weblogs. "When Eclipse Europa was released on June 29 (together with the iPhone and the GPL 3 license), I wanted to know if it did anything about one of my many pet peeves: tool support for writing JSF apps. In this blog, I will compare Eclipse 3.3 and NetBeans 6.0 milestone 10 to see how they do on the world's most mundane JavaServer Faces application: the login example from Core JSF."

Arun Gupta discusses another new NetBeans feature in NetBeans 6 M10 and Web Service Designer. "NetBeans 6 Milestone 10 is now available. One of the new and noteworthy features is better Web services support. This entry is a follow up to an earlier post where Web services designer was tried on Milestone 9."

Finally, in Metro in JBossWS, Vivek Pandey writes, "JBossWS has announced support for Metro. Many JBoss users are already using Metro, and this is the latest addition to the Application Servers supporting Metr:, Glassfish v2, Web Logic Server and TmaxSoft JEUS. I would like to highlight as why you should chose Metro in Glassfish as your Web Services stack."

In today's Forums, Jim Graham addresses imaging methodologies in the thread Re: [JAVA2D] Java2D anti alias rounded corner fidelity problems. "Problems like these have appeared with tools like Illustrator for a long time and the community has built up "strategies" and "techniques" for creating artwork that agrees with the rendering models. The "hinting" heuristics help in some common cases so that most programmers/designers don't have to get involved in these strategies, but eventually everyone outgrows the heuristics and needs more control."

deronj announces a new Project Wonderland feature in Shared X Apps Take Control / Event Mode Cataclysm has been integrated. "I've integrated the "Take Control / Event Mode Cataclysm." In this relatively large code change I've changed the way that a user takes control and releases control of shared X11 apps. Here is a brief summary..."

steevcoco shares some real-world thread strategies in Re: How to find out if a thread has finished execution? "This thread highlights a real bane of Java as I see it: the API is filled with two layers of stuff: things you should use, and things used by the things you should use! And the third layer is always being built as we speak! But the documentation is not always clear bout what to use when. Maybe, actually, the tutorial is good at this. I haven't looked there in a while, and actually, it was a good reference when I started... But in any case [...] you should move away from handling threads and Runnables by hand. As someone else also said, use the concurrent package."

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Scratch JSR-313... EE 6 lives on as JSR-316
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